Posts Tagged ‘festival’

St. Augustine’s will be featuring some great and unique beers from across BC at their CAMRA Vancouver Summer Beer Festival this Saturday, August 14th. Saturday’s festival, the first CAMRA Vancouver festival held at St. Augustine’s, will feature over twenty beers from twenty BC breweries. Many of the beers featured will be cask-conditioned. These seasonal releases, experimental batches, and one-offs have all been crafted by local brewers with the discerning craft beer lover in mind.

Many brewers have gone beyond the use of brewer’s yeast in their offerings this weekend. These brewers have instead created sour or ‘wild’ beers with the use of lactic acid bacteria and Brettanomyces, a wild yeast traditionally viewed as a contaminant in the production of most beer styles. This weekend’s festival will feature three examples of these sour or otherwise wild beers from BC craft brewers.

Russell Brewing will have a pin of their 100% Brettanomyces beer entitled “Brett Lambicus and the P-Funk All-Stars”. As the name suggests, this is a pale beer fermented and aged six months exclusively with Brettanomyces Lambicus.

Iain Hill of Yaletown Brewing will have a cask of his Brick and Beam IPA cask-conditioned with Simcoe hops and Brettanomyces. Iain cultured this Brettanomyces strain from a bottle of Orval, which gives the IPA a sweet, fruity Brettanomyces aroma.

Dave Woodward over at High Mountain will have a keg of his Berliner Weisse, a light, refreshing sour wheat beer. This beer underwent a secondary fermentation for several months with Lactobacillus delbrueckii to create what Dave describes as an extremely well attenuated beer with a light lactic nose and tart finish.

The above beers are just the beginning of the creative, interesting beers present at this weekend’s festival. Here’s a complete list of the casks and kegs at the CAMRA Vancouver Summer Beer Festival.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about how what is considered to be the working man’s beer is anything but. Ironically, the worker is persuaded through multi-million dollar marketing campaigns that guzzling a multinational corporation’s industrial lager is more appropriate than buying from a local small business, a style of ale with a history pre-dating lagers by centuries. Craft beer is somehow “fancy,” even though a barley wine, bitter, or brown ale is still made, like lager, with water, barley, hops, and yeast.

It is actually quite easy to shatter this myth if you take the trouble to meet some of your local brewers. The best place to meet them is in brewpubs because they often work within plain sight and even hang out at the bar to eat or have a beer after work. However, if you happen to be shy or introverted, here’s a video produced for Vancouver Craft Beer Week to introduce you to the down-to-earth folks known as Canadian craft brewers:

As you can see, there’s nothing fancy about what our craft brewers do. They just make a good honest brew that doesn’t have to have micro-bubbles, be cold certified, filtered five times, called something it isn’t, or served with a lime in order to sucker you into drinking it. There are more flavours in beer than honey and lime waiting to be experienced. Meet a craft brewer, and they will be happy to show you the way.

Vancouver has experienced varying degrees of success with its beer festivals, but hasn’t found its groove to the degree that Victoria has with the Great Canadian Beer Festival or even Penticton with the Okanagan Fest-of-Ale. Having heard this topic brought up on a number of occasions over the past couple of years and the inevitable lamentations that followed, I was determined to do something about it.

The main challenge with putting on an event similar to the aforementioned, though, is the money required to stage it. It seems that those with the passion don’t have the money and those with the money either don’t have the passion or don’t have the confidence in you pulling it off if you haven’t already proven yourself. If passion for craft beer and money were hand-in-hand in Vancouver, then we wouldn’t be in this Catch-22 predicament.

Nevertheless, staging a large event on a single day without a reputation from a positive track record is a risky venture. There is a lot riding on just a few hours. The GCBF and OFOA got to where they are today by lots of hard work, building them up over more than a decade from smaller beginnings. Would we really have to wait that long before Vancouver finally has itself a beer festival worthy of its status as the largest metropolis in Western Canada? Could we wait that long?

Spinnakers is hosting its second cask festival on November 21, building on the success of its inaugural event on March 14 and the growing profile Real Ale is getting in Victoria. This is also a great opportunity to meet brewers from both the Island and the Lower Mainland, many of whom previously brewed at Spinnakers.

What’s the big deal about meeting a brewer? It’s like knowing a farmer, butcher, baker, or cheesemaker — you have a direct relationship with where your food and drink comes from that helps you to know what you are consuming. You also have a better opportunity to understand the process from source to table and even, perhaps, influence what the producer makes.

Here is the lineup:

Central City ESB

Dead Frog Oaked Winter Warmer

Deschutes Jubelale

Dix Barley Wine

Driftwood Porter

Driftwood #2 TBA

Granville Island TBA

Lighthouse Winter Ale

Longwood Brewpub Imperial Stout

Mission Springs Winter Pumpkin Ale

R&B Bourbon Oak-meal Stout

Spinnakers Gingerbread Ale

Spinnakers Mt. Tolmie Dark Ale with Highland Park 18

Storm TBA

Swans TBA

Vancouver Island “Caskannator”

Whistler Brewhouse Woodwards IPA

Spinnakers is dedicated to sourcing local ingredients, therefore, I can’t think of a better way to celebrate Slow Food and Real Ale than spending an afternoon at the gastropub on Lime Bay.

The Victoria Times Colonist reported yesterday on an apparent scam that appears to have surfaced in connection with the Great Canadian Beer Festival.

A non-brewer participant with a booth at the festival was offering a free trip to Las Vegas for anyone willing to fill out a ballot with their name, address, and phone number. Those who entered the contest are now getting calls to say they’ve won a four-day cruise from Orlando. However, they are being asked for their credit card information to make a $300 per person deposit to hold hotel rooms in their name.

If you’re going to the GCBF and haven’t perused the brewers list on their Web site, you may want to make your way over there to plan ahead for what you definitely don’t want to miss out on.

For myself, I’m not interested so much in the exhibitors with bottles aka import agents and large producers. You can buy these in a liquor store. My first priority is breweries whose products I can’t get here. Of those, cask ale tops the list as they may be a one-off or at least of a regular style they brew but of unique character.

Non-B.C. breweries I’m looking forward to sample are Baron, Boundary Bay, Peaks, Silver City, Wild Rose, and Wildwood. Bushwakker from Regina, SK, is one coming the furthest to represent themselves and another I’ll be thoroughly evaluating. Paddock Wood from Saskatoon will be there too, but their products are available in Vancouver and they have exhibited only bottled product in the past.

My second priority is B.C. brewers with a cask, a seasonal, or something new, followed by breweries whose beer I’ve never tried — Barley Mill Brewpub from Penticton and Hells Gate in Delta (I suspect this is the new Mark Anthony brewery).

Central City Thor’s Hammer is another standout. Brewer Gary Lohin used to make this when at Sailor Hagar’s. Sailor Hagar’s still have some of it from ten years ago and had a keg on draft last December — incredible! Word is they have one left, so keep an eye out for it later this year. In the meantime, you can try Thor’s Hammer the Younger in Victoria. If you’ve had Thor’s Hammer the Elder, you will recognize the progeny. Hopefully, Gary will put some away in a cool, dark corner and sit on it for a few years. Otherwise, bottle it so we can do so.

We’ve been expecting a Dead Frog cask in Vancouver from Tony Dewald (formerly of Dix) for a while, but he did not participate in the Surrey Summer Cask Festival, nor Caskival 5 at Dix — much of whose success is because of him. Now it looks like he’ll have a cask of their Nut Brown, so I’m anxious to sample it.

Dave Woodward’s Heart of Darkness from Whistler Brewhouse won best beer at the Central City’s Surrey Summer Cask Festival. An Imperial Stout aged on bourbon-soaked oak, it is a delightful mouthful that ought to be a staple Après-ski winter warmer in the Village.

If you stop by the Crannóg booth, one sample you should try to get Brian make up for you is a blend of 1/3 Pooka Cherry and 2/3 Back Hand of God. It makes a wonderful cherry stout.

On a final note, don’t overlook the wonderful cider from Merridale. Their cask Cyser is a must. It’s very popular, though, so I would recommend sampling it early. It also makes sense to do it before the big-flavoured, high gravity ales so you can fully appreciate it.

If you haven’t finalized plans to attend the GCBF yet, you may be out of luck getting tickets through regular channels, especially for Saturday. However, there is an opportunity to get both your ticket and accommodation in one handy package: